


I'd Still Stare at You

by marauders_groupie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 16:58:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6965506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/pseuds/marauders_groupie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing about Clarke's soulmate makes sense until she meets Octavia’s brother. </p>
<p>And then it’s like every puzzle piece that hasn’t been able to fit the picture suddenly clicks.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Prompt: Where a tattoo isn’t set from the moment you’re born and whatever tattoos your soulmate gets, you get them, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'd Still Stare at You

**Author's Note:**

> Woah, look at who's writing soulmate AUs again! I bet you're super surprised and I can hear your dramatic gasps!
> 
> Anyways, [April](http://bellamyblakeprotectionsquad2k16.tumblr.com/) sent me this prompt with a special little request - that there are some tattoos the other doesn't like, so you can expect that, too.
> 
> The title is from that tumblr quote everyone and their mothers have seen "In a room full of art, I'd still stare at you." I have no idea who said it but it made sense for this AU.
> 
> Enjoy!

This is how it starts:

Bellamy Blake wakes up with flowers blooming on the skin of his hipbones and his first thought isn’t that he’s got a soulmate who wanted roses all over their skin. No.

His first thought is that they have thorns and maybe they suit him.

“You’re just poking holes in something that should be good,” Octavia tells him, rolling her eyes like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.

So Bellamy swats at her leg and returns to examining the tattoo in front of the mirror. She sits cross-legged on his bed and muses about who his soulmate might be. At sixteen, the thought seems romantic to her.

“Just imagine – it’s your soul’s other part. Someone who’s predestined to be good for you.”

But Bellamy doesn’t smile, his finger hovering above a rose curling into the vee of his hips, like he’s afraid that the ink will disappear if he touches it. Like it might be poison or medicine and he’s not sure which is which. His face stays frozen in a scowl because he’s seen what soulmates do to people and he has no intention of loving someone so much he’d set himself on fire to keep them alive.

“Sure, O,” he murmurs, breaking the spell of being stuck between his reflection in the mirror and the dark, unfilled ink of his soulmate’s tattoo. “Good for me.”

 

This is how it starts:

Clarke Griffin is sixteen and wakes up with a map of Earth on her back, spaces between lines begging to be filled with color. She stands in front of her closet mirror for the longest time, eyes widening and narrowing in accord to finding that this is one of the most beautiful tattoos she could have ever imagined.

Clarke Griffin is sixteen and she’s got charcoal smudges on her cheeks. The only thing she can do is want to paint art on her skin, too.

“Tattoo artist?” Wells asks over lunch in their high school cafeteria. The tattoo on her back stings a little, like a reminder that she has a soulmate. It’s too big for her to wrap her head around so she doesn’t.

Instead, she pokes the apple on her plate with her fork and chews obnoxiously. “Yep. Screw med school, this is what I want to do.”

“Because of your soulmate?”

“Maybe.” She thinks about it. Sure, she could change the world and save lives when they’re on the brink of death. But what happens to people who need something beautiful on their skin to look at and find new hope? Who saves their lives? “I don’t know, Wells, but I know that it’s what I really want to do.”

Wells Jaha leans back in his seat, takes one good, long look at her and then his lips part in a full-on grin.

“I believe in you, Clarke. Let’s do this.”

 

*

When he’s twenty-one, Bellamy’s got a world map tattooed on his back and roses curling around his hips. When he’s twenty-one, Octavia is sitting in front of him on his couch in a run-down little apartment and crying her eyes out, tears pouring like they’re never going to stop.

When he’s twenty-one, Bellamy’s mother has just died from an overdose and his sister is in pieces.

“Hey, O,” he whispers, draping an arm around her shoulders and squeezing hard like that’s going to stop her from falling apart. He’s not sure whether he’s trying to comfort himself or her. “Hey, it’s going to be alright. I’m going to take care of you, huh?”

She looks at him, wide-eyed and hopeful, teeth still sharp and still this scrawny kid he remembers picking fights when he begged her not to. She wears her scars like trophies.

“No, Bell, that’s – “

He smiles at her with the last ounce of strength he’s got. He feels the roses on his skin, reaches out to touch them with the tip of his index finger, and begs for his soulmate to be with him in this moment. He needs them, needs anything, needs a sign from the heavens above that he can do this.

“When you were born, I promised I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you. We’ll get through this, you and I.”

When he’s twenty-one, the history books on his desk get shoved in the bottom of his closet, the clerk accepting his college drop out forms smiles sadly, and Bellamy looks at the world map on his back for the longest time.

Some other day.

 

At the same time, Clarke is nineteen and studying art. One of these days, she’s going to stop being the stereotypical artsy kid that wears Van Gogh-printed socks and has paint underneath her fingernails, but it won’t be today.

It’s a perfectly sunny day, she has her overalls on and she feels like the whole world around her is pulling at her fingers, begging to be painted. It’s a good day to be alive, with Finn’s fingers running through her hair and Wells with his head thrown back in a laughter.

“What’d I miss?” she asks, as if waking from a daze. Everything is a little better now, a little brighter.

Finn smiles at her like she’s uncovered all the secrets of the universe and she thinks of the map on her back. Replaces that thought with the one of Finn’s tongue tracing the roses on her hips, smiling sweetly when he finds the thorns hidden inside (“Just like you, huh, Clarke?”).

All is well.

(Nothing really is.)

“We were just laughing at Jasper,” Wells replies, pointing towards where Jasper is trying to ask Maya out. Monty is sitting in the grass two feet away from Clarke and he winks at her. Just yesterday they were drinking his moonshine out of the beakers he snatched from the chem lab.

“Is he going to ask her out?”

“I think that’s what he’s doing.”

Clarke frowns at Monty. “Why is he kneeling, then?”

“Jasper’s idea of asking someone out.” With that, he throws his hands up in the air as if surrendering. “Don’t ask me, I barely managed to talk him out of a promposal.”

Maya joins them on the grass next morning and tucks herself into Jasper’s side like that’s the only place she wants to be. When she meets Clarke’s eyes, there’s silent gratitude in them – for the world that let her be this happy. Clarke smiles in response, squeezes Finn’s hand tighter.

(All is well.)

Jake Griffin dies two days later and Clarke scratches her skin so raw that even Bellamy wakes up with scars.

 

*

 

Bellamy learns a lot by the time he turns twenty-three. He learns that no one cares about a desperate boy trying to protect his sister from the cruelty of the world surrounding them. He learns that social workers may look sympathetic but the most important factor is always going to be how much he earns.

He learns the taste of heartbreak intimately, watching Octavia kick and scream at the guards taking her into foster care one year before her eighteenth birthday. He learns what it feels like to disappoint someone you care the most about.

He learns what calluses on his hands from working on construction and taking graveyard shifts in bars feel like the day after.

Bellamy learns a lot by the time he turns twenty-three and gets a purple butterfly tattoo on his shoulder. A girl lies in bed next to him, eyes glassed over and finger tracing the tattoo.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a butterfly fan, Blake.”

He doesn’t know what she’s doing there but she smiles with just a dash of danger and her legs can wrap around his waist so, so easily.

But she laughs at his tattoo and he thinks of Octavia curled up in a bed in a foster home, tears spilling on the pillowcase he hasn’t picked out for her. The girl – Echo, he remembers now – has malice in her eyes and he gets up.

“Leave, please.”

She does and Bellamy keeps working, works through his birthday and through Christmas, Easter and whichever other holiday comes. He works and learns and feels the cruelty on his skin but pushes back not to go down the same way.

By the time Octavia is eighteen, he’s got a room ready for her and she doesn’t let go of him for weeks.

“I’m sorry, O.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, Bell. You did all you could.”

It’s only when he sees her arms covered in sleeve tattoos, mountains and drawings and lines that mean nothing to him, that he thinks of his own soulmate. What would they think of how he’s disappointed the one good thing he’s had in life?

What would they think of a man who can’t do shit for love?

What sort of love could he give to them when he can’t even love his sister like he should?

 

 

Clarke gets drunk with Raven six days in a week and wakes up with a hangover on her graduation day. Finn looks at them with fear almost palpable in every move he makes. The two girls stand united, together, fiercer with their teeth gritted and their shoulders squared.

Raven laughs into Clarke’s hair, Clarke pets her back and Raven keeps saying, “We did it. We graduated. There’s a whole world out there, ours for the taking.”

A week later, Clarke holds Raven’s head in her lap when the sirens are too loud and the wound in her back doesn’t stop bleeding. Raven’s eyes are overflowing with tears and where she once repeated that the world is theirs for the taking, the engineer and the artist, bonded over an asshole who tried to fuck them over, only to realize that there is a reason why they call war ships and hurricanes ‘she’ – where Raven once repeated that they were invincible, now she just repeats –

“I can’t feel my legs. Clarke, I can’t feel them.”

This is how a heart breaks, Clarke realizes. It didn’t break with pouring lighter fluid over Finn’s car and Raven throwing the match with a roar.

It breaks with Raven waning in her lap and with waiting rooms that smell of Clarke’s father’s death. It breaks with Abby operating on Raven and collapsing into tears when Clarke finds her in the staff room. There is so much blood on her uniform and she looks at Clarke with all the weight they’ve both piled up over the years.

“Nerve damage in her left leg.” Clarke knows how Wells broke his arm when they were seven, and she feels like she knows the same details about the tears soaking through Abby’s uniform. “Clarke, her left leg is gone. God, Raven – “

Raven smiles sardonically when she wakes up and promises that she’s gonna fight this, too. “I’m awesome. Did you forget that, Griffin?”

The asshole who shot her when they were just trying to have fun in a club and got in the middle of a gang war, he doesn’t get caught and Clarke gets a heart tattoo on the inside of her wrist. It isn’t the cartoon one, nice and pretty. No, this heart is bleeding red and just as painful as real hearts are. Because heart is a heavy burden, but the soul is even heavier.

She counts all the tattoos; the empty world, save for the USA, butterfly she gets pissed off at seeing (who even _is_ her soulmate?), the flowers on her hips, the heart on her wrist. She counts them and as she counts them, Bellamy Blake does the same.

He looks at the heart, a bloody, bruised raw thing and for the first time in his life, he feels understood.

Six months later, Raven lies on the tattooing table and holds Clarke’s hand. Lincoln, the man Clarke co-owns The Sky People Tattoo Studio with, smiles at her as the metal brace on her left leg clinks against the metal of the table.

“So, planets? Should we include Pluto, too?”

Raven shoots him a glare. “Hell yeah we’re including Pluto. Not all of us are traitorous bastards.”

Maybe Clarke’s best friend isn’t going to become an astronaut but she sure as hell is at least some percent starlight, and Clarke smiles at her.

“We do this together, Rae.”

“You don’t have to get a matching one, you know that,” Raven reminds her, eyeing her warily like she’s hoping Clarke will go through with it like she’s promised, but knowing that she really doesn’t have to.

Clarke just squeezes her hand tighter, every tattoo on her body suddenly burning up in pain. Red neon sign flashes across her wrist, illuminates the heart and makes it look even more grisly. “Don’t worry about it, Spacewalker.”

Their tattoos look the same when they _ooh_ and _aah_ at them later on in the day. Whiskey is poured, music is turned on, and maybe they’ve been through hell but at least nothing bothers them much now.

 

“What the fuck is _that_ supposed to be?” Octavia asks when Bellamy starts getting the batter for blueberry pancakes ready. He’s not sure at first what Octavia is trying to say but then she drags him over to the mirror and points at his back.

“I’ve got the universe on my back,” he whispers, only slightly awed. He’s still the same Bellamy, the same scar he got when he was ten above his upper lip, the same tattoos – his and his soulmate’s, sometimes clashing vividly – but there are all the planets of the Solar System on the skin of his back and he’s not sure how to react to that.

Octavia keeps frowning at them, almost like they’re betraying her in a way, and he gets that. She has a soulmate, too, but their soulmates haven’t fought for them. Their soulmates just existed and the Blakes shouldn’t be blaming them, but. They still do.

“What’s the point of soulmates, anyways? It’s not like they helped us. Look at what Mom’s soulmate did for her.”

“O – “

“It’s bullshit, okay?” she defends, crossing her arms at her chest. Economics major in the morning, ballet lessons in the afternoon and kickboxing in the evening. Octavia Blake, 18. “It’s fucking bullshit and I’m getting these tattoos removed.”

They keep growing, the tattoos on her arms, but they are not her and Bellamy sees the way she looks at them when she thinks he can’t see her. They are not who she is.

Neither are Bellamy’s, but he still finds comfort in them. Twenty-five and he’s still a stupid kid. “Okay, Octavia. It’s your call.”

His call is letting them stay, the roses and the heart and the map and the butterfly. Everything. Hoping that one day, it’s all going to make sense. Hoping that one day he’s going to get the privilege of being able to think about his soulmate, not just bills and late night shifts.

One day.

 

*

 

It’s bleak midwinter when Lincoln meets his soulmate. He and Clarke are loitering around the reception area of their tattoo studio, shooting the shit, when a girl – more of a hurricane than a girl, really, wild eyes and frantic movements – bursts in through the doors.

“I want a tattoo and I heard you guys are the best.”

Just like that, no explanation provided, and it catches them off-guard. Lincoln still wears long sleeves to cover the scars from the tattoo removal his soulmate got – erasing the tattoos he’d worked on for years, and he pulls at them as he ushers the girl into the studio.

Clarke follows them because she’s fascinated. Somehow, it’s as if the world has gone a little off in the moment between the girl bursting in and asking for a tattoo, and it’s not until she says that she wants her arms to be covered in flowers, wolves and butterflies, that Clarke realizes.

It takes Lincoln a little longer but the girl has the same scars as he does, bare arms with patches of unevenly colored skin, and then he smiles, breaks out into a grin similar to Wells’ when Raven asked him out.

Her friends are getting better these days but Clarke has a feeling of static in her head, like someone’s pressed a pause on the remote control of her life and now her skin is itching for something – _anything_ – to happen.

The girl’s name is Octavia and when Lincoln tells her that she might be his soulmate, she punches him.

“That’s for not being there when I needed you,” she explains calmly, clutching her hand to her chest as Lincoln stands frozen in his tracks. “And for the stupid tattoos. What the fuck was I supposed to do with a Pisces sign when I’m an Aries, huh?”

Clarke has no idea how they make it work but by the time Octavia’s tattoo is done (a masterpiece, really), she’s spending more time in their studio than at her own place.

“Don’t you have a home, Octavia? You know, that thing with four walls and a bathroom?” Clarke asks her, sliding a macchiato her way. Octavia wraps her fingers around the mug, rolls her eyes at Clarke, all the while comfortably perched on the reception desk.

“I have an address on my ID, but, like, I’m not sure?”

It is around that time that Clarke wakes up with words in Latin on the length of her calf, courtesy of her soulmate.

_per aspera ad astra_

Wells has to bite into his cheek to stop himself from smiling when Clarke tells him and Raven about her new tattoo. “We weren’t going to tell you, but Raven and I think you should maybe consider the possibility of your soulmate being an eighty year-old Latin professor.”

“I’ve got a list of retirement homes you can check,” Raven adds, a shit-eating grin splitting her face in half.

Nothing about her soulmate makes sense until she meets Octavia’s brother.

And then it’s like every puzzle piece that hasn’t been able to fit the picture suddenly clicks. He walks into her studio laughing, eyes crinkled in the corners with mirth, inky curls wild and all over the place, muscles stretching his button-down and the kind of worn leather boots that feel larger than life.

His name is Bellamy Blake and she doesn’t even have to look at his tattoos to know that she has the same ones.

“You,” he says, and it’s just like that. It’s not a war drum, it’s the faintest, softest hum of her soul – _hi, yes, you’re the one and you did take your sweet time coming home, but you’re here now._

Her life so far has felt like someone’s fast forwarded it, like she’s been going through things too fast and without a second to breathe, but when he walks in, Clarke swears she can feel the hitch.

She swears that Earth moves just a little, showing her how _off_ everything has been and how _right_ it is now.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she says and means it, smile pulling at the corners of her mouth as Octavia and Lincoln watch them with undisguised interest.

The rest of the world is just background noise as Bellamy reaches for her hand, rolls up her sleeve until he can find the heart she had tattooed when she was tired of loving and just wanted to be alone. It’s done her enough harm.

But now he traces the ink with careful fingers, every touch setting her nerves on fire, and finally, he smiles, ducking his head and covering it like it’s too private for anyone to see.

“You’re my soulmate.”

Clarke has heard those words said in so many voices, in so many different ways, but this one was meant just for her. And it’s not a shout or a roar, it’s just the feeling like she’s been away for a long time and now she’s coming home.

It makes her heart flip as she turns her palm to reach for his wrist, squeeze it until he looks up at her. “Wow, that’s fast. Aren’t you going to take me to dinner first?”

Bellamy laughs with every year of fighting he’s had to do and says, “I think that’d be only polite.”

And he does take her out to dinner, as soon as her shift is over, but he lingers in the studio all through it. He tells her about Italy he’s had filled with red ink on the map of the world on his back and Clarke teases him because red ink is the trickiest of them all. She tells him about Raven and Lincoln, tells him that it’s his fault she’s a tattoo artist, and Bellamy smiles like he’s been hoping she’d say that.

Octavia eyes her warily when Bellamy and Lincoln leave to get coffee and warns, “Be careful with him. You break his heart, I break you.”

Breaking Bellamy’s heart, for some reason, feels like blasphemy. Clarke feels like she’d break her heart, too.

“Don’t worry, Octavia. I won’t. I’m just happy I met him.”

“He’s been through a lot, Clarke. If you can’t love him like he deserves, well, then don’t give him false hope.”

It’s obvious, really. Octavia wears her scars like kill marks, as a sign of pride. Look at all the shit I’ve withstood. But with Bellamy – with him, it’s different. With him, it’s the little, soft glances he shoots at Octavia, it’s the kindness that comes after cruelty.

With him, it’s the sigh he lets out when Clarke’s locked the door of the studio and they’ve found themselves on the street.

“I don’t know how to behave. I want to – “ he struggles to find the words and she watches him, watches his frantic movements, how he bites into his lower lip, shakes his head. A silent battle unfolding within him. “I don’t even know you and I want to do everything with you. How is that normal?”

“It isn’t,” she tells him, dropping the keys into her bag and setting their course for the diner down the street. Bellamy links his fingers through hers and it’s good. It’s electric. It’s a flash of neon blue in a world of pale greys. “Let’s get to know each other first. I want this to be a choice.”

Regular date, she’d be asking him where he grew up or what does he do.

This date, they talk logistics. Of course her soulmate would be as weird as she is. In retrospect, it makes sense that he orders pancakes and coffee and starts the conversation like he’s starting a meeting.

“I think we should decide what this is going to be. I know people usually expect their soulmates to take over their life but I have respect for your time and – “

“Professionalism?” Clarke teases. “Yeah, Bellamy, be really clinical about this.”

He flashes her a pleading look and she decides to put him out of his misery.

“The first thing I want is you to tell me who you are. I feel like that’d be a good start.”

The breath of relief he lets out sets relief into her own bones, too, and she traces the heart as he tells her about his life, about his mother, about Octavia, about the pain of dropping out of school, but he brushes over the years that took him to where he is now.

“So I own a bookstore now, and I’ve just been to Italy. I couldn’t believe all the history and, Clarke,” he leans forward, eyes as if he has been lit up from within, “it’s everything. Imagine everything, history and love and culture and food, and all that exists – now, that’s Italy. No stone left unturned. Everything is woven into the very fabric of what that country is. Two weeks wasn’t enough.”

She stays quiet and listens, warmth blooming in her chest. Of course this is her soulmate. Of course this is who the universe thinks she could be with.

But in the end, it’s a choice, and neither of them would have it any other way.

So Clarke takes him to museums and he takes her to concerts. He links his fingers through hers in the crowd because – “You’re tiny, you could get lost” and she threatens to bite his ankles because he’s plain rude.

She takes his hand when she wants to steer him to a favorite painting of hers and his thumb caresses her chin when she gets bits of cotton candy stuck to it.

He makes her coffee with a dash of cinnamon when she drops by his bookstore and she’s got cookies for whenever he visits her in the studio.

When Octavia gets hurt falling from her bike, Clarke is the one holding his hand in the waiting room as she watches his heart break on his face. Lincoln’s got a scrape on his cheek from where Bellamy punched him, looking for someone to blame, and it’s war, of course it’s war.

No matter how much any of them hope for peace, it’s just not in the cards.

“I can’t lose her, Clarke,” he whispers in the dead of night, no one but the two of them and a flickering bulb in the sterile hospital corridor. It feels like nothing is going to happen ever again.

So Clarke cards her fingers through his hair until he drops his head into her lap and nuzzles her thigh, keeps his eyes wide open like he’s afraid of falling asleep. “You won’t, Bell, I promise you won’t.”

Octavia makes it, gets a tattoo to celebrate, and her laugh is victorious when she sits on her bike. Clarke is the one holding Bellamy’s hand again.

When she’s tired, Bellamy welcomes her into his apartment, gets Netflix running and she remembers those nights by the clinking of beer bottles and the crackling of popcorns. He doesn’t have a microwave and it’s just another one of those things that don’t add up about him.

He is a paradox, of course he is, but she’s getting to love him for it.

Love, coincidentally, is one of the things they don’t talk about. Clarke knows the feel of his sweatshirts when she comes by unannounced with pencils holding her hair up in a bun and Bellamy knows the feel of her when the world has gone just a little too rough on her.

“Can I just stay here and be small for a moment, please?”

He kisses her forehead and lets her snuggle up with him.

It’s Raven who calls her out on being an oblivious dork when it comes to him, but it’s fine. Clarke knows they’re not in a rush. They’ve just found each other and they’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.

So that’s what they do. Bellamy wears blazers with leather patches on his elbows and combat boots that have seen better days, and he recites Sappho the same he recites Pablo Neruda. Clarke lets him wipe away the paint smudges on her cheeks when it’s been a good weekend and she’s felt inspired. She lets him unwind her hair and she tells him about her childhood, about Wells and her mom and Monty and everyone else who’s ever made her feel loved.

He meets all of them, of course, but –

“I love hearing you talk about them.” He smiles, and he’s got his different smiles. There’s a grin, a smirk that shows just how cocky he is, a private little smile he barely lets anyone see, and the regular smile he uses around everyone.

And then there’s the beam Clarke feels like it’s earned whenever she sees it.

She gets the beam one night in July, months after they’ve met, and the air is vibrating with an oncoming storm, dark clouds overhead. Bellamy’s apartment is small and they ditch the couch, just plop down on his floor and try to breathe.

When they’re like this, they’re all miles of bare skin barely covered by thin cotton, and she traces the butterfly on his back, decides that now might be the time to ask.

(They don’t talk about two things: love and tattoos.)

“Why did you get this one?”

Bellamy flinches, looks at her warily, like he’s wondering what he can expect out of her. There is a split seconds in which she wonders who hurt him, who’s made him stop trusting people he should know he can trust.

(There is a split second in which she knows he could ask the same about her.)

“Because Octavia ended up in foster care and I needed something to remind me of her. Because I needed to remember that the fight wasn’t over, that I couldn’t stop pushing. Because she loves butterflies.”

Clarke has spent years thinking that her soulmate would be flaky, maybe a party girl, or frat boy douche incarnate, because of that tattoo.

And now she just feels quiet inside. Like nothing can touch her anymore, like this is it.

She presses her lips to the tattoo. “Alright.”

Bellamy smiles at her, soft, and asks, a playful lilt to his voice, “And why are you wearing your heart on your sleeve?”

“Because it was either going to revive me or kill me.”

When there’s enough wine in her system, Clarke gets poetic and wistful. When Clarke gets poetic and wistful, Bellamy tucks a curl behind her ear and lets his hand linger on her cheek for longer than it should.

It takes her a second or two to forget Raven’s face, to forget the whole parade of them in front of her eyes. Memories never leave her, they just give her some room to breathe sometimes.

“Per aspera ad astra?”

Bellamy chuckles. “Through hardships to the stars.”

To that, Clarke hums in confirmation. “I can get behind that, sure.”

“And what about the planets? I never could figure the planets out.”

“Raven.”

He nods solemnly like that’s enough. Like he’s gotten to know just how fierce Raven and she are about each other, how they’ve got the passionate, furious kind of love that means killing everyone to save one another.

“I’m glad you are like this,” he tells her, with all the weight of a soulmate, suddenly. On a good day, they pretend they’re just a boy and a girl. On a bad day, they realize the full weight and they’re not sure they’re prepared to bear it. “I’m glad you were loved, and not lonely.”

“I’m sorry you weren’t.”

Because that’s the truth and Bellamy smiles crookedly, scoots closer to her until he can put his head in her lap again, closing his eyes as she runs her fingers through his hair.

“Through hardships to the stars, right?”

Clarke knows that she falls in love with Bellamy, brash with his hard edges, cinnamon in morning coffee, softness on the tips of his fingers when he tucks a curl behind her ear - she knows that she's fallen in love with Bellamy in her favorite art museum because in a room full of paintings, she still stares at the constellations written across his cheeks.

And he doesn’t even notice it, too interested in every painting she takes him to see, because he’s eager and he wants to know her with sticky fingertips like a kid that’s just stolen a cookie before dinner. Because he wants to know everything there is to know about her, eyes lighting up whenever he finds out something new, even if it’s just that she scraped her knees falling from the top of a closet when she was six.

The words roll over her lips even before she’s aware she’s talking. “I’m glad it’s you.”

And Bellamy looks at her with honest surprise, like she’s caught him off guard, like he can’t believe what she’s saying.

When she slides a hand into his hair, holding on to his waist with the other, and props herself up on her toes, she gives him a second to think about it.

“Clarke – “

Her lips barely brush over his before he’s wrapping his arms around her, pulling her in and returning the kiss fully. In a way, it feels like coming home. In a way, she should have expected that. It’s Bellamy.

It’s Bellamy with his huge heart, with his frowns and with his smiles and the scar on his upper lip he got when he tried to save a neighbor’s cat. It’s Bellamy who moans into her mouth when she bites his lower lip, fervent hands, like she wants all of him and like she’s waited for fucking enough.

It’s Bellamy who’s breathless when they finally part, her forehead against his, trying to get to reason, trying to –

God, Clarke is done trying.

“I need you, okay? I need you. I don’t care, we’ve suffered enough.”

He blinks at her, his eyes endless pools of all the life that’s behind him and that she’ll get to know. Because she wants to, because she’s dying to. He’s like a book that she’s been waiting for all her life and now she can’t pry her fingers off it.

“Good.” He presses a peck to her lips, thumb brushing against the bare skin of her lower back. “Because I’ve needed you for such a fucking long time and I still can’t believe we’re here now.”

Clarke kisses him again because the world can burn for all she cares, she’s got him.

“Believe me now?”

She kisses him again on the train and she kisses him again when they laugh as they collapse on her bed.

“Believe me now?”

“Believe me now?”

He whispers ‘I want you’ in the skin of her hips, kisses the heart on her wrist, traces every planet on her back with his lips, and she keeps asking –

“Believe me now?”

She keeps kissing him like she’s going to heal every fucking broken thing in both of their bodies and he keeps letting her. When she gets him to beam at her, just after he’s whispered her name into every corner of her body, fervent, searching hands, like they’re going to reach a revelation together – when she gets him to beam at her, she kisses him again and asks –

“Believe me now?”

And Bellamy Blake smiles with mouthful of lost civilizations and the kind of heartbreak that pours and pours like it’s going to wash the world away. He smiles with pain and love and terror and _hope_.

He smiles with hope and he says, “Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> That's it! Thank you all for reading and I'd love to hear your thoughts. I am trash for kudos and comments so I'd appreciate that a lot. :D
> 
> p.s. i'm also on [tumblr](http://marauders-groupie.tumblr.com) so come hang out with me there


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